Movie Review: Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

The sad reality of most movie-going experiences is the fact that you usually get a catchy title followed by an underachieving film. And then there is Tokyo Gore Police. A movie so gory, violent and outrageous that it completely defies description, (but I will do my best to convey the experience). Picture a film soaked in blood and covered in a thick coating of fleshy pieces and bone fragments. There are just not enough words in a thesaurus to describe what happens in this film. Think RoboCop meets Evil Dead meets Pans Labyrinth meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Enter The Dragon x 100 after 10 hits of really good acid and then your starting to get an idea of what this is about.

The film is set in the Tokyo of the future, where crime is rampant and the police force has been privatized. The streets being patrolled by armor-clad cops serving as judge, jury and executioner to any and all would-be criminals. Their main enemy being The Engineers, genetically mutated berserkers who are capable of sprouting deadly weapons from any type of injury they incur. These mutants are so dangerous they require a special police squad to hunt them down. Among this special squad is Ruka (the super-hot Eihi Shiina, best known for her memorable performance in “Audition”) who has a bad habit of cutting herself with a box-cutter for fun and chopping people in half with her samurai sword. Ruka herself is being hunted by The Key Man (Itsuji Itao), the mad scientist who was the creator of The Engineers. As his creations run amuk through the city, slaughtering everyone in their path, Ruka's investigation leads her to confront her dark past and a realization that she may have more in common with The Key Man and his Engineers then she does with her fellow police officers.

In this, his directorial debut, Yoshihiro Nishimura, who is also the brains behind all of the wildly outrageous special effects, shows that he is the Steven Spielberg of gore and shock. The camera work is fantastic and this film is laced with a lot of clever moments in between the scenes of pure mayhem in the form of bizarre tv commercials selling razor-blades specially designed for self-mutilation in lots of cool colors, the best sword to buy if your feeling like committing hari-kari and outrageous police propaganda plugs, very reminiscent of the satirical jabs at commercialism shown in “RoboCop”. For me what sets this movie apart from the pack are the spectacular and unrestrained special effects. It's like a mile long buffet of insanity in the shape of deformed appendages, gaping stab wounds and high pressure fountains of spraying blood.

Personally, if I get just one “You gotta be fucking kidding me!” moment out of a film, I am pretty happy. While watching Tokyo Gore Police I lost count after 6, and every time I thought it couldn't get any crazier, it did. The highlight for me being the scenes shot in the fetish club where a police officer goes to indulge in sex with a mutant. On display in the club are a series of horribly deformed mutants, one girl has been turned into a snail, another has a cock for a nose and one who would make even David Cronenberg gasp, a woman who has been turned into a living breathing chair, yeah you heard me right. She is swung around to face the crowd and sprays them with a golden shower from her fleshy flower-like vagina. The cop picks out a very attractive mutant prostitute and they go to a private room where she straps him into a chair and promptly bites his cock off. As he is crawling through the halls trying to escape, he shoots the chick in the vag with a sub-machinegun and her snatch turns into a giant snapping,

alligator-like monster but before she can dispose of him, he himself mutates and his chopped off weenis turns into a giant flesh covered cannon and he does her in, in disturbing, glorious fashion. And just when I thought it couldnt get any more awesome, The Gore Police treats us to a most-shocking character, a quadruple amputee in a gimp outfit, complete with penis guns, acid spewing tits and samurai swords for limbs. Creepy, twisted, weird and just so fucking over-the-top, thats the only way I can describe this film. But above all, it was just plain fun. It is a masterpiece of insanity that sets the bar so high I dont see how it can possibly ever get topped. And its for that reason that I am bestowing my highest possible honor on Tokyo Gore Police, and if you are a fan of horror movies you are cheating yourself if you dont see this movie atleast once in your life time.